Guild Wars 2

So, i had this idea today in wvw, after seeing a group of 40+ being reduced to ashes in mere seconds…

Let’s say you have two full partied of mesmers, each has their character specced to allow them max clones which i assume is three? (i dont play/have a mesmer)

Lets say this party of 10 spawns all of their clones, How many physical clones+players in total? I’m assuming we have 30 clones and 10 players, correct?

Is this how this works? I’m really thinking of making a mesmer and doing this in WvW with some buddies. Running around terrorizing random small pug groups..

Is this viable? What am i overlooking here?

3 to 1 would be right. You need to make sure that all the players make characters that look exactly alike and dress in the same armor/color.

Expect lots of tears. Have a couple of people bring mass invisibility/veil and portal for extra fun

What server are you on!

Since you (TS) don’t have a Mesmer, I think you don’t even know how Illusions/ Clones work.
Basically, what you describe is a Necro/ Ranger tactic – running around with your minions. This can’t be done with Mesmers/ Clones. Clones void to exist (die) if they don’t have a target. So you can only summon your clones in combat, not walk around with them. You’d have to wait to run into enemies to get your 10*3 minions. When you can target the enemy, the enemy can target you as well. Then every mesmer picks the same target (the front one) all 30 clones attack this one. It will die in a second (sharper images, otherwise clones don’t do damage – if you didn’t know) and 50% of the mesmers’ clones couldn’t even be summoned in time, since the target died – yet their CD applied. But regardless of that, all clones will die as well, since they don’t have a target anymore.

tldr;
Try this with necros, not mesmers.

What Nretep explained.

While the technical fats of what Nretep said are correct, his conclusion is horrificly flawed. While you can’t run around with an army of clones, upon meeting people, each mesmer can easily kitten 1, 2, or even 3 clones immediately and triple the size of the force running at them. With no names in WvW, this would be an unbelievably hellish tactic, combined with the other fun mesmer tricks of mass invisibility and feedback.

^
did you read the whole “technical fats” I stated?
Even if would be able to summon your 30 clones (unprobably; ever tried to summon your clones in an event with 10 participants ?) all 30 clones would die when the first target died – after approx 1~2s. Then you’d be at 10 squishy players again (or 8~9 since the enemy attacks, too).

Using Mass Invisibility with 10+30 allies … I’d laugh.

Maobirds… Maobirds everywhere.

@Nretep: Summoning all 30 clones on the same target would be a stupid tactic for the reason you specified

Let’s say each mesmer selects a different target for their clones, if any given target in the equal sided fight dies, you lose up to 3 clones. The mesmers co-ordinate to focus their OWN attacks on the same target; this’d spike them down in seconds too, but the other team are still presented with up to 3 decoys for every real mesmer.

If the victims spread their attacks they’ll burn through the clones quickly, but not take down the mesmers at any real speed and the mesmers can easily drop a bunch more clones in second. If they focus fire, there’s a 75% chance they’ll waste their cooldowns on a decoy.

And Ryuujin?
What’s all this going to achieve in the end?
The time it takes to coordinate all this, being very lucky and so on, those 10 Mesmers will have been roflstomped down.
Even if you try to Coordinate Mind Wracking (aoe bombing), the only way I could see some success with this kind of pratice, it’ll only work against very bad “zergs” and only once.

Just summon 30 clones with a condition spec, they dont deal noteworthy dmg anyway, they wont kill anything by themself, take on death-effects (you need at least confusion for this) = fun.

evade → clone, Mirror Images, Decoy… you can keep this stuff up quite some time

(This actually also does work in spvp against anything melee/aoe as a single mesmer)

What really hurts my brain is why people assume that 10 players will attack the same target.

It really makes me laugh though when players go to great lengths of coordination, strategic and tactical depth to lose a fight. If they applied half that much specificity and effort to winning a fight, they’d be boss.